OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
January 28, 2005

Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web
CaféI love the use of nature photographs in
this article to run a parellel threat interspersed with the
discussion, which is an aggregation and summary of the
critiques of folksonomies. The author's main intent is to
defend the careful creation of metadata, and the sloppy and
sometimes spammed metadata used in folksonomies is clearly
not that. But from where I sit, folksonomies - as
implemented by Technorati Tags - conflate two things:
first, the idea of user-created classification, and second,
aggregation of those classifications by what amounts to a
'push' technology. My take is that it is the latter, not
the former, that is the problem here. Anyhow, don't miss
this article. By Shelley Powers, Burningbird, January 27,
2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

YABP (Yet Another Blogging
Presentation)Good presentation by Scott
Leslie on blogs in learning. He outlines, with examples,
several types of blogs in learning. He emphasizes a "focus
on 'blogging' as process and not 'blog' as noun." And while
remarking on their potential, he cautions that there are
still few good examples of the use of blogs in learning. By
Scott leslie, Ed Tech Post, January 27, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

A Conceptual ramework for
e-PortfoliosScott Wilson points
to this diagram of e-portfolios and comments that it
"clearly places ePortfolio outside the organization."
George Siemens writes,
"I'm excited by what is coming out of eportfolio projects
(Elgg in particular) - they seem to be aware of how
learning has changed (definitely more aware than most
academic institutions)." Which is as it should be. By David
Tosh, January 27, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Relative Effectiveness of Computer-based and
Human Feedback for Enhancing Student LearningThe Spring, 2005, issue of the Journal of Educators
Online is now available. I cite one article, this one
looking at the effectiveness of computer-based feedback on
test results. The not so surprising conclusion: feedback
doesn't work if the students don't read it. More generally,
the feedback has to be useful to the students, and what
students want is feedback that tells them whether they got
the answer right. Of course, studies measuring the
effectiveness of automated feedback have had wildly varied
results. This is what we would expect when the type of
feedback, the type of learning, student motivations and
context play a significant role in the outcome. PDF. By B.
Jean Mandernach, Journal of Educators Online, January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]